Utopia Justifies the Means - TV Tropes

Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; …

By the 1850s, Germany was , and seminal discoveries and achievements came from German labs. As agriculture became industrialized, two nutrients were identified as key limiting resources as per : phosphorous and . Until 1909, humanity’s source of nitrogen for agriculture was manure. Guano was even the main source of nitrate for gunpowder when World War I began in 1914. After a century of failure by many eminent chemists, in 1909 made one of history’s most momentous breakthroughs when he . That energy-intensive process is responsible for half of humanity’s food supply today. It is also partly responsible for a great deal of water pollution, , and proliferation of weaponry. Haber has also been called the father of chemical warfare, as he was instrumental in , but he nevertheless won his Nobel Prize in 1918 for his nitrogen breakthrough. Phosphorus, which forms the , is the sole element that humanity has not found a substitute for in industrial civilization. Energy makes nitrogen and other elements more available or allows for substitution, while phosphorous must be mined or recycled. German chemical wizardry continued after World War I, and Germany was the center of science in the early 20th century. Relativity and quantum theory, the two pillars of today’s physics, were developed in Germanic nations, and Einstein, , , , , , and dominated physics in the early 20th century, with relatively minor contributions from American, British, and French scientists. From the first Nobel prizes awarded in 1901 to the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933, more than a third of the awards in and went to Germans, and if the Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, Danish, and Swedish laureates are added, they amount to well more than half, particularly for their theoretical work.

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and noted that Eurasia was spread along an east-west axis, while Africa and the Americas were north-south, which made Old World diffusion easier, but that idea also has problems, as Fertile Crescent crops did not spread to East Asia due to rainfall timing differences (winter rains in the west and summer monsoons in the east). Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations had dramatic geographic limitations, which was their greatest contrast with Eurasian civilizations. However, like the migration of or the exchange when , it was easier for cultural innovations to spread along the same latitude, as they would move through similar biomes. North-south diffusion is far more difficult, as it moves through different biomes, such as tropical forests and . Eurasia's geography was more conducive to communicating innovations, which made it more cosmopolitan than sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, which helped them technologically advance at a faster pace. Isolated peoples are usually culturally and technologically backward compared to nearby peoples who are more cosmopolitan, and people isolated by mountainous geography, such as those of the Scottish Highlands, Balkans, Appalachia, and Southeast Asia were relatively primitive compared to those around them. and are classic instances of isolated peoples keeping their cultures intact, which provided a window into the human past, but their cultures also did not "progress," which included their technology.

When historians debated the causes of Rome's decline and fall, for instance, they were merely debating proximate causes, which was understandable, as the science of energy did not yet exist when . Once scientists began to study the issue, running out of energy became seen as the ultimate cause, even though scientists still argue over environmental causes, for instance, but what some seem to miss in their arguments is that they are all just ways of saying that the civilization ran out of energy, whether humans contributed to the environmental failure (and declining and surplus energy) or not.

Salt Lake City, Utah, Sunday, January 4, 1880

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of today’s puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadl’s view, traditional Islamic law can still be applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien “abode.” To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.

How A German Historian Predicted The Decline Of …

One powerful attraction of political theology, in any form, is its comprehensiveness. It offers a way of thinking about the conduct of human affairs and connects those thoughts to loftier ones about the existence of God, the structure of the cosmos, the nature of the soul, the origin of all things and the end of time. For more than a millennium, the West took inspiration from the Christian image of a triune God ruling over a created cosmos and guiding men by means of revelation, inner conviction and the natural order. It was a magnificent picture that allowed a magnificent and powerful civilization to flower. But the picture was always difficult to translate theologically into political form: God the Father had given commandments; a Redeemer arrived, reinterpreting them, then departed; and now the Holy Spirit remained as a ghostly divine presence. It was not at all clear what political lessons were to be drawn from all this. Were Christians supposed to withdraw from a corrupted world that was abandoned by the Redeemer? Were they called upon to rule the earthly city with both church and state, inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or were they expected to build a New Jerusalem that would hasten the Messiah’s return?

I have to give 1940s commentators credit; they understood the , and better than I often see it today. They understood that if there was an abundant source of energy, Utopia was possible. Socialists quickly understood that the "free energy" that nuclear energy could make possible would undermine capitalism, as the profit motive would be a poor one for denying prosperity to all of Earth's people, and would not be tolerated. One socialist tract argued that the soaring standard of living that abundant energy would make possible could ensure that no child on Earth would "carry the grime of poverty on his face and soul." Socialists also realized that atomic energy would be a disaster if controlled by military and capitalist interests. Other commentators disparaged the prosperity that nuclear energy would bring, as people would simply have too much time on their hands, which could "doom" civilization.

The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization’s earliest days. Fixating people on irrational symbols, and then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the ; as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of , and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally charged symbols. The effects of can last for the victim’s lifetime. When people mistake symbols for reality, they are easily manipulated. Large-scale ideological indoctrination probably began in Sumer, as the priesthood concocted and promoted various beliefs. Symbology replaced reality, including the acceptance of the secular elite as deific, getting slaves to accept their status, and getting commoners to give food to the priesthood to fulfill some divinely ordained obligation. Religion passed from experience to belief with the rise of civilization. I am not suggesting that pre-civilized religions were necessarily enlightened. They had shamanic intermediaries too, but with the rise of civilization, the priest class had to work hard to justify the obviously unfair social organization that accompanied stratified populations. Direct religious experience was disparaged and suppressed while the priesthood’s religious indoctrination was promoted.

Those energy concepts are real ones that all economies face, and financial measures only reflect them. In the USA, just , Peak Oil was . In 1973, the first oil crisis hit, and have declined since then. Wages were only a reflection of energy consumption, which also peaked in the 1970s for the USA and by that real wages per hour have. The USA’s declining standard of living since the 1970s was minor compared to the devastation inflicted on developing nations. The was initiated by the oil price shocks of the 1970s. Many nations have yet to recover. When the oil price shocks hit, and other measures were inflicted by Western institutions on developing nations. As people such as , those policies were intentionally used to enslave those nations. On the world stage, the self-image promoted by the West is that of blundering do-gooders. As people such as , it is a false narrative designed to hide corrupt motivation from the outset. It is simply more of that . I have written a great deal elsewhere on , how the resembles fairy tales, how professions and industries have , how the , just like genocidal invasions, were always economically motivated, usually to secure energy resources. This essay does not need to belabor those trends, but anybody not can clearly see that the game being played on the global stage is the same one that has been played: economically exploiting others. Because industrialized civilization is beginning to run out of the energy sources that the West used to industrialize, a universal decline in humanity’s standard of living has begun. The USA has transitioned from the land of opportunity to a deindustrializing economy in which bankers and other capitalists are designed to rob one class in favor of another. The aspect of those machinations is painfully obvious. The mind-control techniques that Orwell and Huxley wrote about have been turned into sciences, and there are even “competitions” between their dystopian visions to see .

about 10 kya. Pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent , and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early. Farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, and humans replaced herd leadership. Since are , their understanding of herd behaviors probably made their efforts more successful.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau > By Individual Philosopher > …

White's "Mistress Masham's Repose"An interesting article in "The Quill and the Unicorn" speculates on a possible historical origin for Fairy tales:{This genre essay most recently updated: 4 April 1998} Fictional and Nonfictional glimpses of an ideal futureScience fiction, in its extremes, presents us with a menu of extremely dreadful futures ("") and absolutely wonderful futures ("Utopias").

Uncle Dale's Old Mormon Articles: SLC Tribune 1880-89

On the other hand, their world has no rape, murder, arson, or even litter. Unusually, this is one of the more even-handed examples, with both "Utopia" and "the means to it" being shown in fair measure.